Last week I was fortunate enough to spend a few days at Wisford House for a Wilton Park conference “Beyond aid: innovative governance, financing and partnerships for the post-2015 agenda.” The meeting emphasized thinking beyond aid, to the ways in which aid funds can leverage other, larger flows of money (i.e. private capital) in manners that speed or transform ongoing changes among the world’s poor. In short, it was a meeting that embraced a shift from aid as “fixing things for poor people” to aid as “catalyzing and accelerating what people are already doing to create faster, more impactful outcomes.” The question, of course, is exactly how to shift aid fully into the latter role in the context of the third Conference on Financing for Development coming up in July, and the ongoing development of Sustainable Development Goals that should conclude in 2015.

As the conference kicked off with a discussion of the new SDGs, Charles Kenny serendipitously tweeted out their current structure:

Just as I started to freak out (as did Simon Maxwell, who was seated next to me and saw the tweet at about the same time), Charles followed up:

So, 303 indicators (several of which are actually unmeasurable in the usual indicator sense) feeding into 169 targets which speak to progress toward 17 goals (Charles was off by one). My first reaction, which I shared with the conference, was that this structure was useless, either as a set of focusing goals or as a set of aspirational targets.

First, these do nothing to focus us. With 303 indicators aimed at 169 targets, any reasonably talented program officer should be able to reverse justify any and all existing programming under this structure. Were I still advising a presidential appointee at USAID, and they asked me about the SDGs, I would tell them not to worry about it as there is nothing in this structure that constrains anything that the Agency does.

Second, these goals don’t feel aspirational – but this is for a variety of reasons that I can lump into three categories: the impossible, the vague, and the “sounds good, but on second thought”. Over the next few posts, I will lay out what I mean with examples of each category. Today, I focus on…

Let’s just get something on the table right away: None of these goals is going to be achieved by 2030. First, “poverty” is a pretty vague term that means much more than income. While the indicators proposed under Goal 1 certainly recognize a complex understanding of poverty, including income, access to productive resources, social protection, and exposure to shocks and stresses, the ways in which these different factors align to produce “poverty” depends greatly on where you are. As a result, there are many “poverties” in many places. Therefore, it is not clear to me how a broad set of indicators will tell us if we have succeeded in eradicating poverty in a particular place.

Goal 2, ending hunger, is easier to measure as an outcome, but very difficult to measure as a process (as most determinants of food security are social, and we have very weak data on these processes in most parts of the world). The indicators don’t tell us where to intervene, or how we will know when “hunger” has been ended. Given 49.1 million Americans lived in food insecure households in 2013, it seems extraordinarily unlikely we will be able to meet this goal globally.

And Goal 5… we’re not even close to gender equity here in the United States, but somehow we are going to fix this globally in 15 years? Folks, gender relations and equality are issues that take a minimum of three generations to address – and that would be extraordinarily rapid change. 15 years is about one generation.

It is not that I hate (or even dislike) aspirational goals. However, goals should be achievable and actionable so we can hold people accountable for their achievement. None of these three goals meets either criteria. Can we make significant progress on addressing some components of poverty in the next 15 years? Yes. Can we reduce food insecurity in both rich and poor countries? Yes. Can we make some movement on the status of women and girls in both rich and poor countries? Yes. And we should work toward all three, but with ambitious but achievable targets. If the goals are achievable, then we can hold someone accountable for any shortfalls in 2030. Accountability fosters action. Right now, nobody will be held accountable when we fall short, because in 2030 whoever is still around will (rightly) point out that these were always unachievable, and therefore it is nobody’s fault that we did not meet these goals.

So, I dislike impossible goals because they strip away responsibility for their achievement. If these were ambitious but achievable, it might force those of us in the aid world to think more carefully about how we are going to leverage other sources of funding, other trends already taking place in many parts of the world (declining fertility, rising incomes, etc.), and build on existing knowledge and capacity among the global poor to ensure we reached these goals. In short, impossible goals do nothing to move us beyond aid – they just maintain the status quo.

So, DfID paid London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) more than $1 million to answer a pretty important question: Whether or not Fairtrade certification improves growers’ lives. As has shown up in the media (see here and here) and around the development blogosphere (here), the headline finding of the report was unexpected: wage workers on Fairtrade-certified sites made less than those working on regular farms. Admittedly, this is a pretty shocking finding, as it undermines the basic premise of Fairtrade.

Edit 12 June: As Matt Collin notes in a comment below, this reading of the study is flawed, as it was not set up to capture the wage effects of Fairtrade. There were no baselines, and without baselines it is impossible to tell if there were improvements in Fairtrade sites – in short, the differences seen in the report could just be pre-existing differences, not a failure of Fairtrade. See the CGDev blog post on this here. So the press’ reading of this report is pretty problematic.

At the same time, this whole discussion completely misses the point. Fairtrade doesn’t work as a development tool because, in the end, Fairtrade does absolutely nothing to address the structural inequalities faced by those in the primary sector of the global economy relative to basically everyone else. Paying an African farmer a higher wage/better price means they are now a slightly wealthier farmer. They are still exposed to environmental shocks like drought and flooding, still tied to shocks and trends in global commodities markets over which they have almost no leverage at all, often still producing commodities (like coffee and cocoa) for which demand is very, very elastic, and in the end still living in states without safety nets to help them weather these economic and environmental shocks. Yes, I think African farmers are stunningly resilient, intelligent people (I write about this a lot). But the convergence of the challenges I just listed means that most farmers in the Global South are addressing one or more of them almost all the time, and the cost of managing these challenges is high (both in terms of hedging and coping).Incremental changes in agricultural incomes will be absorbed, by and large, by these costs – this is not a transformative development pathway.

So why is everyone freaking out at the $1 million dollar finding – even if that finding misrepresents the actual findings of the report? Because it brutally rips the Fairtrade band-aid off the global economy, and strips away any feeling of “doing our part” from those who purchase Fairtrade products. But of course, those of us who purchase Fairtrade products were never doing our part. If anything, we were allowing the shiny idea of better incomes and prices to obscure the structural problems that would always limit the impact of Fairtrade in the lives of the poor.

One of the dangers of acting as a critic is drifting into troll territory, where you are constantly complaining and finding fault, but rarely adding constructive ideas to the conversation. I fear that my concerns with contemporary food security conversations are headed in that direction. And, well, USAID asked on twitter, which probably violates my late father’s first rule of cross-examination: never ask a question for which you don’t want an answer.

So, over the next few blog posts I am going to try something that many academics and critics would never risk: I am going to put some ideas down about how we perhaps should be building food security programs right now. You all can have at these. I can make some changes and edits. We can argue some more. And somewhere in there, maybe something that is both workable and more likely to actually work will emerge.

The major points of how I think we ought to be addressing world hunger look like this:

1) Get over production: it’s rarely about production, and focusing on it draws us away from the real causes of hunger

3) Create exit points: a critical problem in agricultural development is the all-too-rapid march to market integration, without appropriate attention being paid to the new risks such integration creates. In most places where agricultural development takes place, market integration predicated on the simplification of existing agricultural activities to even fewer crops is a recipe for disaster that removes the safety nets that the rural poor have already created.

4) The future is already being fed: while we live in a world of economic and environmental change, these changes are not linear. We’ve already seen extremes of both that represent conditions beyond what we expect to see as the “new normal” in the future. Why not figure out what people did to address those extreme events, and build off of that?

I will elaborate each of these points in its own blog post over coming days. The goal will be to make each point clear and actionable. The other goal is to present a real alternative to what I firmly believe are misguided initiatives dominating the contemporary food security conversation. We’ll see if I can pull it off.

While behavioral economics continues to open old questions in development to new scrutiny, I am still having a lot of problems with the very unreflexive approach BE takes toward its own work (see earlier takes on this here and here). Take, for example, Esther Duflo’s recent lectures discussing mistakes the poor make. To discuss the mistakes the poor make, we must first understand what the goals of the poor are. However, I simply don’t see the behavioral economists doing this. There is still a lurking, underlying presumption that in making livelihoods decisions people are trying to maximize income and or the material quality of their lives. This, however, is fundamentally incorrect. In Delivering Development and a number of related publications (for example, here, here, and here) I have laid out how, in the context of livelihoods, material considerations are always bound up in social considerations. If you only evaluate these actions as aimed at material goals, you’ve only got a part of the picture – and not the most important part, in most cases. Instead, what you are left with are a bunch of decisions and outcomes that appear illogical, that can be cast as mistakes. Only most of the time, they are not mistakes – they are conscious choices.

Let me offer an example from Delivering Development and some of my other work – the constraint of women’s farming by their husbands. I have really compelling qualitative evidence from two villages in Ghana’s Central Region that demonstrates that men are constraining their wives’ farm production to the detriment of the overall household income. The chart below shows a plot of the size of a given farm versus its market orientation for the households operating under what I call a “diversified” strategy – where the husband farms for market sale, and the wife for subsistence (a pretty common model in sub-Saharan Africa). As you move up the Y axis, the farm gets more oriented toward market sale (1 on that scale is “eat everything”, 3 is sell and eat equally, and 5 is sell everything). Unsurprisingly, since men’s role requires them to produce for market, the size of their farm has little impact on their orientation. But look at the women’s farms – just a tenth of a hectare produces a marked shift in orientation from subsistence to market production…because women own that surplus beyond subsistence, and sell it. They take the proceeds of these sales, buy small goods, and engage in petty trading, eventually multiplying that small surplus into significant gains in income, nearly equaling their husbands. What is not to like?

Well, from the perspective of those in these villages, here is something: among the Akan, being a “good man” means being in control of the household and out-earning your wife. If you don’t, your fitness as a man gets called into question, which can cost you access to land. For wives, this is bad because they get their land through their husbands. So as a result, being in a household where the woman out-earns her husband is not a viable livelihoods outcome (as far as members of these households are concerned). Even if a man wanted to let his wife earn more money, he would do so at peril of his access to land. So he is not going to do that. What he is going to do is shrink his wife’s farm the next season to ensure she does not out-earn him (and I have three years of data where this is exactly what happens to wives who earn too much). There is a “mistake” here – some of these men underestimated their wives’ production, which is pretty easy to do under rain-fed agriculture in a changing climate. That they are this accurate with regard to land allocation is rather remarkable, really. But the decision to constrain women’s production is not a mistake, per se: it is a choice.

We can agree or disagree with the premises of these choices, and their outcomes, but labeling them as mistakes creates a false sense of simplicity in addressing problematic outcomes – because people only require “correction” to get to the outcomes we all want and need. This, in turn, rests on/reproduces a sense of superiority on the part of the researcher – because s/he knows what is best (see a previous post on this point here). That attitude, applied to the case above, would not result in a productive project design aimed at addressing income or other challenges in these villages.

Yes, people do things against material interest…but there is always a logic behind a decision, and that logic is often deeply entrenched. We would be better off talking about decisions poor people make (for better or worse), and dedicating our time to understanding why they make these decisions before we start deciding who is mistaken, and what to do about it.

I’ve just burned 15,000 words in Third World Quarterly laying out my argument for how to think about livelihoods as more than material outcomes – and how to make that vision implementable, at least via fieldwork that runs in length from days to months. I am happy to send a copy of the preprint to anyone who is interested –and I will post a version to my website shortly.

I’ve long hated the term “poverty traps,” development shorthand for conditions in which poverty becomes self-reinforcing and therefore inescapable without some sort of external intervention. They made no analytic sense (nobody ever defined poverty clearly across this literature, for example), and generally the idea of the poverty trap was hitched to a revival of “big push” development efforts that had failed in the 1950s and 1960s. Further, it was always clear to me that the very idea of a poverty trap cast those living in difficult circumstances as helpless without the intervention of benevolent outsiders. This did not align at all with my experiences on the ground in rural sub-Saharan Africa.

This is not to suggest that there is no such thing as structural inequality in the world – the running head start enjoyed by the Global North in terms of economic development has created significant barriers to the economic development of those residing in the Global South. These barriers, perhaps most critically the absurd and damaging regime of subsidies that massively distorts global agricultural markets, must be addressed, and soon. Such barriers generally result in perverse outcomes that impact even those in the Global North (anyone who thinks the American food system makes any sense at all really needs to read more. Start with Fast Food Nation, move to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and work out from there. And don’t get me going on the potential climate impacts of structural inequality).

But this enduring focus on structural problems in the global economy has had the effect of reducing those in the Global South to a bunch of helpless children in need of salvation by the best and most noble of those in the Global North, who were to bring justice, opportunity, and a better future to all. If this isn’t the 21st Century version of the White Man’s Burden, then I don’t know what is. Bill Easterly makes a very similar point very eloquently, and at much greater length, here.

I am a social scientist*, and I believe that the weight of evidence eventually wins arguments. And today it occurred to me that in this case, this long line of arguing that those who insisted on talking about poverty traps were a) generally misrepresenting the world and b) inappropriately infantilizing those living in the Global South now has that weight of evidence behind it. Andy Sumner’s work on the New Bottom Billion basically blows up the idea of the poverty trap – he demonstrates that since the 1990s, a lot of people that were thought to be living in poverty traps have improved their incomes such that many have moved out of poverty (at least if one defines poverty on the basis of income). People who were thought to be trapped by structural inequality have been defying expectations and improving their circumstances without clear correlations to aid or development efforts, let alone the “big push” arguments of Sachs and others. In short, it looks like we don’t really understand what people are doing at the margins of the Global South, and that the global poor are a lot more capable than development seems to think. Poor people attached to the anchor of structural inequality are dragging it to improved incomes and well-being in thousands of small, innovative ways that are adding up to a massive aggregate change in the geography and structure of global poverty.

In short, the Global South never needed the most enlightened of the Global North to clear the path and push them up the ladder of development (if you want to get all Rostow about it). Instead, what is clearly needed is a new, substantial effort to better understand what is happening out on Globalization’s Shoreline, and to work with the global poor to examine these efforts, identify innovative, locally-appropriate, and locally-owned means of transforming their quality of life, and find means of bringing those ideas to (appropriate) scale. Anything else is just hubris at best, and subtle class/race bigotry at worst.

The data is speaking. Anyone ready to listen?

*Well, I am a qualitative social scientist which means my work is more generative and humanities/arts flavored than is typical in the sciences, which generally value the reporting of observations in the framework of already-established biophysical processes.

Ben Leo at ONE.org (formerly of CGD) put forth an intriguing proposal recently on Huffington Post Impact: It’s Time to Ask the World’s Poor What They Really Want. In short, Ben is trying to argue that the current top-down definition of development goals, no matter how well-intentioned, is unlikely to reflect the views of the people these development goals are meant to benefit.

Hear, hear. I made a similar point in Delivering Development. Actually, that sort of was one of the main points of the book. See also my articles here and here.

But I am concerned that Leo is representing this effort a little too idealistically. Just because we decide to ask people what they want doesn’t mean that we will really find out what they want. Getting to this sort of information has everything to do with asking the right questions in the right way – there is no silver bullet for participation that will ensure that everyone’s voices will be heard. To that end, what worries me here is that Ben does not explain exactly how ONE plans to develop the standardized survey they will put out there, or how exactly they will administer this survey. So, here are a few preliminary questions for Ben and the ONE team:

1) Does a standardized survey make sense? Given the very different challenges that people face around the world, and the highly variable capacity of people to deal with those challenges, it seems to me that going standardized is going to result in one of two outcomes: either you ask focused questions that only partially capture the challenges facing most people, or you ask really general questions that basically capture the suite of challenges we see globally, but do so in a manner that is so vague as to be unactionable. How will ONE thread this needle?

2) Who is designing the survey? To my point above, what questions are asked determine who will answer, and therefore determines what you will learn. While the information gleaned from this sort of survey is likely to be very interesting, it is not the same thing as an open participatory process – full participation includes defining the questions, not just the answers. Indeed, I would suggest that ONE needs to ditch the term participatory here, as in the end I fear it will be misleading.

3) How will you administer the survey? Going out with enumerators takes a lot of time and money, and is subject to “investigator bias” – that is, the simple problem that some enumerators will do their job in a different manner than others, thus getting you different kinds/qualities of answers to the same questions. On the other hand, if you are reliant on mobile technology, how will you incentivize those rural populations with mobile handsets to participate? If you can’t do this, you will end up with a highly unrepresentative sample, making the results far less useful.

This is not to dismiss the effort Ben is spearheading – indeed, it is fantastic to see a visible organization make this argument and take concrete steps to actually get the voices of the global poor into the agenda-setting exercises. However, this is not a participatory process – it is, instead, an information-driven process (which is good) that is largely shaped by the folks at ONE in the name of the global poor. If ONE wants this to be more than information-driven, it needs to think about how it is going to let a representative sample of the global poor define the questions as well as the answers. That is no easy task.

In all sincerity, I am happy to talk this through with anyone who is interested – I do think it is a good idea in principle, but execution is everything if you want it to be more than a publicity stunt…

A while back, I was musing about the end of IDA, especially given the interesting work of Andy Sumner on the “New Bottom Billion” and the increasing rate of country “graduation” from IDA eligibility. For those unfamiliar with the term, IDA is the International Development Association, a branch of the World Bank Group focused on assistance for the world’s poorest countries. Countries eligible to receive support from IDA have access to low- or no-interest loans that can be paid back over long periods of time – this is justified by the assumption that IDA-eligible countries will not have access to other forms of credit on reasonable terms, mostly because of conditions in the country that would drive away commercial lenders and other sources of credit. Of course, IDA loans often came with significant conditionality – terms that recipients had to agree to in order to receive the funds, ideally intended to remedy the problems that kept traditional creditors away. While these conditions were meant to help recipient countries, they often proved disastrous (structural adjustment had a lot of collateral damage among the people it was meant to help) and certainly challenged recipient country’s sovereignty, as the conditions effectively moved economic policy decision-making out of the national government and into multilateral donor organizations. Both situations created a lot of tension between the multilaterals and the IDA-eligible countries.

Today, for a lot of reasons, it seems that IDA might be coming to a close in much of the world. Countries are moving beyond the GNI per capita thresholds between low-income and middle-income status all the time (Ghana recently did so), and thus losing eligibility for IDA loans. Further, ever-cheaper sources of capital have been extended to nearly every country in the world, a process that seems to have accelerated since the recession in the Global North (I surmise this has something to do with the fact that the giant pool of global money that no longer resides in real estate speculation needs somewhere else to go). In any case, for most low income countries IDA is no longer the only credit game in town, and considering other sources of credit, especially the Chinese, put very few conditions on their loans, IDA is less attractive all the time. There is still a need for IDA, for a very few countries, but it seems that the tide has turned against it. This is good news – after all, in development our job should be to put ourselves out of business. I think there is significant debate about whether IDA put itself out of business (considering attribution of graduation to IDA assistance is weak, at best), but at least we are seeing a situation where a development institution might finally be losing its purpose because good things have happened in the world.

Having worked for USAID, and now working with the World Bank, I have had the chance to sound out a lot of people in the donor world about this shift. Most people I talk to who have given it any thought recognize that this is part of a much broader shift, one in which the days of “development as financial assistance” (IDA or otherwise) are coming to an end. Going forward, it is clear that development assistance will increasingly be about technical assistance and less about lending (the Obama administration’s pick of Jim Kim as head of the World Bank is a clear signal that they see the World Bank of the future as a technical assistance organization, not a lending organization). It is a fascinating transformation that, among other things, is going to obviate a lot of traditional critiques of aid, which revolved around the economic imperialism that aid dollars allowed – the conditionalities of lending that enabled structural adjustment and its many disastrous outcomes.

But the question of graduation is, of course, a tricky one. Andy’s work, at least when I have been present for his presentations, has drawn questions about what seems to be the arbitrary nature of the lines between low-income and middle-income countries – that is, the movement to “middle income status” might represent a real shift in economic activity, but not a significant change in people’s lives. I’ve expressed concerns about the robustness of “graduation”, as what appears to be a positive income trend in many countries might not have the strongest of foundations, or might be compromised by the impacts of climate change going forward.

So how can we productively track this change in the world’s financial needs and ensure that development takes a relevant shape as we seek to address the evolving needs of the world’s poor (wherever they might be)? Perhaps another, more productive way to think about “graduation” is to examine the point at which investment dollars provided by donors is swamped by private investment such that the aid dollars are no longer effective means of leveraging change. One million dollars can effectively leverage 10 million dollars of investment, but can 1 million dollars leverage 100 million dollars? In most cases, probably not. It would be interesting to look at various countries where aid dollars are of declining importance (Ghana, Zambia, etc.) and determine a) if their situation vis a vis aid investment has shifted such that donor dollars no longer effectively leverage other investments and b) when and under what conditions that shift occurred. It seems to me that this would be a more effective marker in terms of thinking of transitioning from aid as investment to aid as technical assistance, as opposed to a largely arbitrary line in the GNI sand, one subject to rather large margins of error in its calculation. Further, understanding the conditions of a transition from dependence on donor investment to stand-alone FDI recipient would be a key lesson for transitioning other countries out from aid dependence.

This is a rough sketch, but it seems to me this could be done. It would require a bit of research in a couple of key places, but organizations like the World Bank are well-positioned to conduct such research and disseminate the findings. Academia stands ready to help…

So, a while back I decided to talk about how I negotiate peer review, semi-liveblogging my response to a revise and resubmit request from a pretty big development journal (see part 1, part 2 and part 3). Well, I now have a response to my resubmission . . .

No. To quote: “after much deliberation, the editors have reached a rather difficult decision. [The editors] feel that they cannot accept your revised paper.”

Yep, I have gone from revise and resubmit to outright reject. This is . . . unusual, to be honest. More unusual, however, is the rationale for the rejection. To quote from the decision:

What makes this difficult is that [the editors] recognize that you have in fact taken account of what the referees said, and have tried to accommodate their comments, but the editors feel that what has emerged from the revision process is not an appropriate paper for Development and Change.

Translation: you did what we asked, and addressed the referee comments, but in doing so you ended up with a paper that we think belongs at another journal. Well, fair enough, this happens. But why it is not appropriate is a little odd:

While they still believe that there is an interesting idea at the core of your paper, they don’t feel that the revisions have solved the initial problems, and they are not convinced that further rounds of revision would be any more successful. The intended contribution of the paper appears to be theoretical, but the paper hasn’t managed to work out that contribution in a way that will be accessible / comprehensible to our readers.

Soooo . . . I have an interesting paper, but the editors more or less think their readership can’t deal with the complexity of the argument. [Note: I am disregarding the assessment that my revisons have not solved the initial problems, since they already have said that I took account of the referees’ issues – this is a contradiction I am just going to leave aside. That, and they did not show me any reviewer comments, so I have no idea what I did not resolve] One of my colleagues has called this the oddest rejection he has ever seen.

Now, I want to be clear – the folks at the journal with whom I interacted throughout this process were very responsive and polite, and were kind even in their rejection (they were quite apologetic, actually). I would submit to this journal again, though I admit to wondering exactly what aspect of my work might fit here, as I am confused by what they believe the capacity of their readers to be.

This, folks, is the nature of peer review – sometimes, you just have no idea what happened. I am not privy to the internal conversations of the editorial board, and will not pretend to know exactly what happened here. What makes this hard is that I did not receive any substantive comments on this second round of review, so I have no guidance at all on edits. I am rereading the paper, adding a citation I had missed earlier, and making minor tweaks to the argument (the article I missed before actually strengthens the case for what I am doing in the manuscript). I’ve sent it off to a trusted senior colleague to have a look, and to see where he thinks it might go next. I will probably sound out the next editor in advance, just to make sure that s/he thinks the paper is appropriate before starting a long review process again . . .

I’ll be running my mouth about the book again at Chatham University on December 2nd. Chatham has some very cool stuff going in sustainability and the environment (a new school!), including a new Eden Hall Campus in Richland Township, PA. My talk will actually be out on that campus, and not in the Shadyside campus . . . directions are here.